Review - The Quarter-Acre FarmHow I Kept the Patio, Lost the Lawn, and Fed My Family for a Yearby Spring WarrenSeal Press, 2011Review by Cynthia L. PauwelsSep 20th 2011 (Volume 15, Issue 38)

Spring Warren's delightful recounting of her adventure into urban homesteading, The Quarter-Acre Farm: How I Kept the Patio, Lost the Lawn, and Fed My Family for a Year, is part memoir, part instruction manual, and part recipe book. She was a hobbyist gardener until 2008, when a family road trip exposed them to the wonders of fresh vegetable stands and the horrors of factory livestock ranches, and set her on an exploration of agricultural sustainability. "I dreamed of enlarging our garden into a place that we could live off of, a place resembling something between the Big Rock Candy Mountain and Eden." A spate of salmonella and E-coli outbreaks spurred her to stop dreaming and take action.

The project began in mid-June, something not possible in most of the United States, but feasible in her Davis, California, community. Warren enlisted the aid of her reluctant husband and their two sons by assuring them they did not have to partake of her pledge to grow 75% of everything she ate; the remaining 25% would be made up of "grains, dairy, meat, chocolate, or Boston cream pie." Beverages were excluded from the percentages as well. She worked hard to satisfy local zoning requirements by ensuring the "residential character" of the property and not annoying the neighbors, particularly when the geese were vocal.

Warren takes readers through the process of laying out her miniature farm to harvesting, preserving and eating what she raised, sharing the successes (beets, beans) and the failures (early potatoes, mushroom spore, pumpkins) she learned from along the way. By studying the National Garden Bureau's ranking of vegetables, she determined what to plant, when, and where, seeking to gain the most nutritional value and longest growing season in an elaborate rotation and synergistic support system on the previously landscaped area around their home. She killed off the lawn by laying down sheets of cardboard covered with piles of mulch and installed raised-bed garden boxes for most of the produce to enable easier crop rotation. She pruned trees and dug up shrubs. Expanded compost bins were enhanced by worm castings of pellets collected from under the rabbit hutch. Leaves were mulched to add to the pile. Warren also provides a lengthy discussion of "good dirt" versus bad, and the turn-or-not-to-turn compost debate.

Warren shares her experiments in eating the bounty produced by the quarter-acre farm from an excess of zucchini -- the "tofu of the western world" -- to a one-time adventure of processing snails plucked from the plant beds into home-grown escargot bites. Her elder son Jesse, who illustrated the book under his alias of "Nemo," was her first convert, and a valuable resource for both labor and advice. The younger boy Sam earned a status boost when he carried the left-over escargot as school lunch; he gradually came to appreciate the garden and shy away from store-bought produce: "I don't know what's on it, or what's been done to it."

Husband Louis to whom the book is dedicated was the toughest to convince. As the year wound to a close and Warren met her goal of feeding her family largely on what they could grow, he admitted, "We not only didn't starve, we ate great food, and I do think the yard is more beautiful than it's ever been."

Warren debunks the notion that growing fresh food costs more than buying at the market by making liberal use of the local Freecycle network (My.Freecycle.org) and Craigslist for gardening supplies and starter plants. She ends The Quarter-Acre Farm by realizing her experiment, while successful when measured by her original goal, is only beginning. "I'd barely scratched its heavily mulched surface -- there was much more to do, so much more to learn!" This humorous and information-packed volume is a perfect way to start.

Reviewer Cynthia L. Pauwels holds an MA in Creative Writing and a BA in Humanities with a World Classics certification from Antioch University McGregor in Yellow Springs, Ohio. She works as a freelance writer with numerous short fiction, non-fiction and technical writing credits.

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